In Strange Relation, Rachel Hadas, poet, teacher and classicist,
recounts the years just short of a decade of her husband’s descent – retreat is
the word she’d prefer – into dementia. Although no definitive diagnosis emerges
for George’s “spooky condition,” frontotemporal dementia possibly with
Alzheimer’s disease in the frontal lobe seems the most likely. By Hadas’s
reckoning, George’s symptoms began when he was in his late fifties—relatively
young for dementia. Diagnosing any form of early onset dementia is extremely
difficult, especially if memory loss is not among the symptoms, as was the case
with George. Hadas noticed the symptoms — his silences and growing remoteness—
and ascribed them to her husband’s loss of interest in life and their marriage.
She writes, “Slowly and insidiously your partner changes from the person you
married into someone else.”

The book opens in 2004, just before his diagnosis in 2005 at the
age of 61. George Edwards was a successful and celebrated composer of
symphonies, chamber works and art songs, as well as a professor of music at
Columbia University. Through flash-backs, Hadas fills in a portrait of a happy,
mutually supportive marriage of two engaged, successful artists, a life that
slowly melted away as George’s disease tightened its grip. She ends with George
in a long-term care residence in 2009, the year Strange Relation was published
and two years before his death in 2011.

The core of the book, intertwined with the story of George’s
dementia, is Hadas’s account of the comfort she sought and gained from reading
and writing prose and poetry. “This ordeal has eloquently reminded me of the
sustaining power of literature,” she writes. “These gifts of the imagination,”
gave her strength. “They are not sufficient, but they are damn well
necessary.”

Over seven decades of reading have given Hadas a vast store of
literary references to draw on. George is Mr. Dick from David Copperfield,
mentally scattered, shuffling his papers; he is King Lear, losing clarity and
dignity and consumed with anger and humiliation as he feels his abilities fade.
Like Penelope awaiting Ulysses’ return, Hadas sees herself living with George
as “neither wife nor widow,” her husband a physical presence but spiritually
gone. When she reads James Merrill’s “Days of 1964,” she identifies with the
poet who “has gone so long without loving that I hardly knew what I was
thinking.” The poem speaks to her as it captures, “The thirst, the loneliness,
the habituation to emotional deprivation that marked the way I was living.”

A recurrent theme that many will relate to is the loneliness she
feels caring for someone who, because of his condition, hardly speaks or
expresses emotion. Robert Frost’s “Home Burial” reminds her how quickly friends
will turn away from death and illness and “make their way back to life.”
Sickness, says Flannery O’Connor, is a country “where there’s no company, where
no one can follow.” She sees her life reflected in Philip Larkin’s wry poem
about a couple’s estrangement, “Talking in Bed,” – the couple’s growing
estrangement is “this unique distance from isolation.” Hadas finds the clarity
and the company of these works a huge comfort.

There are moments of uplift, too. When her college-age son,
Jonathan, and his friends propose to take George on a two-week getaway of very
rustic living in Vermont, she reluctantly agrees, certain that disaster or
injury will ensue. The reader is as relieved as Hadas is when all goes off
without a hitch.

A recurrent theme of the book is the importance of the language
used to describe a disease and its treatment. Metaphors and similes, of course,
are staples of medical caregiving – “they help us see freshly,” says Hadas;
they help her step outside the moment and understand George, whom she describes
as retreating into a “walled garden” or behind a “frosted window”; his disease
is a bath in which he’s immersed and can never escape; it is a malignant fluid
his brain is stewing in.

Equally, using the wrong metaphors and similes can cause pain and
guilt. A neurologist tells Hadas that she’s feeling depressed because Hadas has
moved into a “new house” and is still living out of boxes, still in transition.
“Make yourself at home,” the doctor advises, “I don’t think you’ve completely
moved in yet.” This only makes Hadas feel inadequate and guilty. “Let’s at
least find the right kind of house,” she writes. Caring for a person with
dementia, as she sees it, is not a house but a prison in which the family
caregiver is the voluntary inmate, “responsible for the daily care of a warden
who has mysteriously changed into a ward.”

By the end of the memoir, George has declined to the point that
Hadas can no longer care for him and has found him a residence, which raises a
new host of concerns. He fails out of the first home and she finds
another. She visits George regularly and experiences a new kind of tethered
freedom. Her divided self, composed of the Drudge and the Poet, dusts off their
apartment to reclaim it from the associations of George’s illness, hoping to
rescue her memories of twenty years of happiness before his illness began to
take him. “It became my home in a new and different way.”

Each phase of her journey is accompanied by poems, twenty-nine in
all, that Hadas wrote to understand herself, clarify her feelings, cope with
the loss of George. Never was Robert Frost’s dictum regarding the ingredient of
a successful poem— “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”
—more pertinent. Along with her reading, Hadas’s poems lead her to insights
that comforted and sometimes surprised her—and will do the same for the
reader.

The book ends with George’s birthday party in 2009 at the
long-term care residence where he finally settled. He died shortly after the
book was published in 2011.

The play is set between 1989 and 1991, the last two years of the life of Gladys Green, an 85 year old woman who runs a small art gallery in New York's Greenwich Village. She lives on her own near the gallery, but she is watched over by an adoring grandson (Daniel) who lives in the same building, and by a doting daughter (Ellen) and son-in-law (Howard), who live uptown from her. Gladys can’t hear very well and she has diabetes, but otherwise she is doing well enough. From this point we watch Gladys gradually lose some of her mental capabilities, mostly memory. Our attention is directed to how the family responds and comes to grips with her deterioration. Aware of Gladys’ past before she opened her gallery as an activist lawyer with a frenetic lifestyle, Daniel lays out a strategy the family adopts: “she’s got to have something to do.” Their chief tactic is to keep Gladys in the gallery where she could mix with people, keying off what she said keeps her sane: “Everyone needs someone to talk to, otherwise you’d just go nutty. I love to talk to people.” This approach works for a while, and mainly through permitting a young artist (Don), who has never before sold a painting, to exhibit his work in the gallery. Don keeps Gladys company and talks to her. He thinks he notices her hearing problem worsening, but Howard tells him, "I’m afraid that’s more her memory than her hearing aid.” What speeds up her deterioration, however, is the gallery losing its lease when the owner of the space decides to turn it into a cafe. A path ensues that is familiar to many people who have been close to a person losing memory and other mental functions with age. The family desperately wants to keep Gladys as independent as possible, but they need more help as time passes. She can stay in her own apartment for awhile with visiting nurses and aides, but eventually she needs to move in with Ellen and Howard; they never liked the idea of putting her in a nursing home, and they never did. In an aside directed at the audience, Daniel describes what his mother did for Gladys thereafter: she “took care of her, dressed her and cleaned her up and fed her and watched her fall apart, day in and day out with nothing to stop it and no relief in sight.” It did end, though, two months later when Gladys died in Ellen’s home.

Maggie O’Farrell describes the book in a scene involving a casual conversation she has with her mother over tea.

As she lifts the pot to the table, she asks me what I’m working on at the moment, and, as I swallow my water, I tell her I’m trying to write a life, told only through near death experiences. She is silent for a moment, readjusting cosy, milk jug, cup handles. ‘Is it your life?’ she asks. ‘Yes,’ I say, a touch nervously. I have no idea how she’ll feel about this. ‘It’s not…it’s just…snatches of a life. A string of moments. Some chapters will be long. Others might be really short.’ (pp. 142-143)

This conversation is the only place in the book where O’Farrell describes her intentions in writing it. But, what O’Farrell describes to her mother is exactly what the book is, a memoir comprising seventeen “brushes with death,” as she calls these moments. There is no prologue, there are no interludes, there is no coda, just the seventeen stories.

Few people will experience any one of these events, and perhaps only O’Farrell has experienced all of the events she tells us about. She categorizes them based on the anatomy involved in a particular brush with death. For example, some of the chapter names are: “Lungs” (three times), “Neck” (twice), “Abdomen,” “Intestines,” “Cerebellum,” “Circulatory System,” “Whole Body.” The one exception is the chapter, “Daughter.”

Other ways of categorizing the near-death experiences O’Farrell covers could be based on whether they threatened O’Farrell herself or any of her children, whether they were the result of bad luck (e.g., illness) or bad judgment (e.g., near drowning), or whether the threat originated outside the body (e.g., accident) or within the body (e.g., illness, medical procedures). The brushes with death from outside the body involved violence (twice), decapitation (twice), drowning (three times), a plunging commercial airliner, and a knife throwing exhibition. From within her body, close calls involved encephalitis as a child, amoebic dysentery while traveling in a developing country, a Cesarean section gone awry, and a few missed miscarriages (i.e., when fetus dies but no signs or symptoms manifest and surgical procedures become necessary). A daughter was born with severe allergic conditions that caused the child misery pretty much all the time interspersed with episodes of life-threatening reactions. O’Farrell’s son was almost lost in one of her near drownings.

O’Farrell leaves it to the epigraph she placed at the beginning of the book to stitch together how these stories collectively reveal the possibility of the human spirit to get us through the most serious and persistent challenges to our being. For this epigraph, she takes a line from Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar:

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist who has been diagnosed with
Schizoaffective Disorder. The Collected Schizophrenias is a book
of personal essays that was the 2016 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction
Prize.

A precocious young person on a track to success, Wang experiences
a manic episode at Yale that leads to her first hospitalization. After a second hospitalization, her college
washes its hands of her. Hitting
roadblocks time and time again requires her to rebuild her life over and over. This is not a conventional chronological
autobiography but rather essays that provide different approaches to the
author’s experience of mental illness.
The plural “schizophrenias” of the title encompasses the whole schizophrenic
spectrum of disorders. As Wang explains,
her own diagnosis is “the fucked-up offspring of manic depression and
schizophrenia” (p. 10).

In an essay entitled “High-Functioning” we learn how the
author, having been a fashion editor, knows how to pass for normal: “My makeup
routine is minimal and consistent. I can
dress and daub when psychotic and when not psychotic. I do it with zeal when manic. If I’m depressed, I skip everything but the
lipstick. If I skip the lipstick, that
means I haven’t even made it to the bathroom mirror” (p.44).

Later, in “The Choice of Children,” volunteering at a camp
for bipolar children makes Wang think about what it would be like to inflict
her diagnosis on her own offspring. In
“Reality, On-Screen” she attempts to convey the sensation of decompensating to psychosis. And in “Yale Will Not Save You” she considers
the failure of universities to accommodate mentally ill students.

This is a gripping, informative, and well-researched book
about human blood. An accomplished journalist, Rose George, covers a variety of
topics, largely in the U.S., Britain, and Canada but also in Nepal, India, and
South Africa. She describes many current
issues, provides historical background, and speculates on future technologies,
such as replacement of blood by other fluids. There are nine sections:

“My Pint” While
the book’s title refers to the author's volume of blood, this chapter’s title refers
to a single pint she is donating. We read about blood supply (donated
and stored blood) in the U.S. and—by contrast—in India.

“The Most Singular and Valuable Reptile” refers to the
leech. This arresting chapter describes both historical and modern uses of
leeches to gather blood from humans. She visits a company called Biopharm in Wales where leeches are raised and prepared for shipment to medical clinics and
hospitals.

“Janet and Percy” is a historical chapter focusing on Dame Janet Maria Vaughan, a central figure in creating the Blood
Transfusion Service in England during WWII and Percy Oliver, who guided its
predecessor, the London Blood Transfusion Service.

“Blood Borne.”
This chapter describes Khayelitsha, South Africa, “the ugly backside of
Cape Town” (p. 100): a place of poverty, crime, rape, sexual predation, and
HIV. While rich nations provide assessment and treatment for people with HIV,
poor nations have many citizens infected with the virus and, over time, rising
rates of infection.

“The Yellow Stuff” describes the plasma portion of
blood; it can be frozen (as FFP) and used as a filler for bleeding or trauma
patients. Unlike blood—which can only be
given without payment—plasma can be collected from paid donors. It is a largely
traded commodity, part of a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. Plasma
carries Factor VIII, a crucial protein for clotting blood; hemophiliacs lack
this and are at risk for death by bleeding externally or internally. Some
plasma has been tainted, for example by HIV.

“Rotting Pickles.”
In Western Nepal (and other places), menstruation is taboo. George writes, “We are in a
minority among species, and among mammals, to bleed every month.” She reviews
historical views of women’s periods, mostly negative. Worldwide, there are many
taboos, but also some educational efforts for public health that are helpful in
impoverished areas.

“Nasty Cloths.” This tells the unusual story of an Indian
man named Muruga, “a poorly educated workshop helper” who became a leader in
creating sanitary protection for menstruating women. Worldwide, the feminine
hygiene industry is some $23 billion. George also reviews related history, including
Toxic Shock Syndrome from tampons.

“Code Red.” Bleeding is often a fatal factor in
trauma, even with the best efforts to transfuse blood into the patient, unit
after unit. George observes open chest techniques at a resuscitation. She
reviews breakthroughs in blood typing, component therapy, and “buddy
transfusions.”

“Blood like Guinness: The Future.” George starts with
images from the past: vampires, human drinkers of blood, past and, even,
present. She interviews a purveyor of the concept that “young blood” is
healthier than older blood. Can there
be, discovered or created, blood substitutes that also save lives?

In That
Jealous Demon, My Wretched Health (subtitled “Disease, Death and Composers”),
Jonathan Noble, a retired surgeon gives us the medical and psychiatric history
of seventy classical music composers. Chapters are organized by illness, ranging from cancer to syphilis to alcoholism. Famous composers such as Schubert and
Shostakovich predominate, but many lesser-known composers, ranging from
Jeremiah Clarke to Gerald Finzi, are also included.

Mozart is one composer whose cause of death
has long been the subject of controversy, and the various theories are comprehensively
explored here. However, the author goes
even further, developing a detailed medical case study of the composer
beginning in childhood. He examines the
toll that Leopold Mozart’s exploitation took on his prodigy son’s constitution,
what Wolfgang’s appearance in the surviving portraits has to say about his general
health, and even whether he may have had Tourette’s Syndrome. Finally, the author ties all of this
together, methodically refuting or confirming each diagnosis, offering far deeper
analysis than one would expect to find in a standard biography.

Another example, the case of Tchaikovsky,
reads like a veritable whodunit. The
composer’s activities during the last two months of his life are scrutinized,
with the likely causes of death systematically disproven or confirmed.

A list of composers who suffered
accidental or violent deaths provides some surprises. You will learn that Lully accidentally stabbed
himself with his conductor’s baton, and that Alkan may have been crushed to
death by a bookcase upon pulling his Talmud off a shelf.

Lily O’Connor is 30 something and working at a seaside arcade in northeastern England. She inherits some money from her mother’s small estate and wants to give her brother Michael his share. But, Lily lost track of Michael during their childhood after they were placed in separate new homes to protect them from the severe abuse their mother was inflicting on them. Michael has become a ne’er-do-well in adulthood, and so Lily’s search for him takes her through the dark alleys of London and puts her in the company of its dodgier inhabitants.

A bigger challenge to Lily in her search and in her life more generally is her epilepsy. How she experiences epilepsy forms the more interesting and dramatic elements of the story. We see Lily have several seizures in a variety of scenarios: before a date, on the subway, at a friend’s house, in a hotel room, and in a nightclub. We see how Lily senses them coming on as she says to herself:

Here’s the breath, here’s the breeze, here’s the shimmer…and I’m falling down the rabbit hole.

We see the ground in front of her becoming fuzzy but closer, then what looks to be her hand reaching out in front of her to lay a sweater down on the ground where she thinks she will land, and then the ground getting fuzzier still as she hits it. From the ground, we see that she can still make out some people bending down to help and others averting their gazes. As Lily loses all focus, hallucinations start, and we see her body floating among patterns of electrical bursts as she experiences them. Next we hear her scream before all goes dark and violent shaking starts. As she regains consciousness, we see what she sees, blurry at first and then as her surroundings come into focus. It may be the inside of an ambulance, a hospital room, or her apartment, where in anticipation of that possibility, she has painted on her walls: Don’t Worry Lily Home Bed Sleep SAFE NOW

As Lily goes into recovery after a seizure, the director takes us from Lily’s point of view to the point of view of bystanders. We see that as a result of these seizures, Lily often sustains bone fractures, lacerations, abrasions, puncture wounds, and bruises among other injuries. She goes about cleaning herself up in a manner that suggests a routine, something she expects. Nevertheless, the loss of time frustrates her.

I just lost 2 days. Chop it up. Chop it out of my life. All the outtakes. What would they look like if you put them all together.

Lily’s adaptation to her seizures and their consequences vexes the physicians she consults, which she does only when her medications are stolen and she needs new prescriptions, and when she is taken to the hospital after particularly bad seizures. These physicians want to get Lily onto newer and presumably better medications. She resists, saying to one of them,

All I want is my old meds back.You know when my scripts change, it messes with my head every time. If you wanna know why I’ve stayed on the old meds, it’s ‘cause I know who I am…You have no idea how new drugs change me, they make me feel like a ghost. Words fall out of my mouth like vomit. My brain, a lump of cold meat. Nah, I’m not doing it.

She decides to forgo all medications if she must move to a new regimen, but it doesn’t go well. Eventually she capitulates, adapts to new medications, and goes on with her life, or as she says, “Thrash, get up, get on with it.”

Kurt Eichenwald shares his experiences living with epilepsy
in an electrifying narrative. Beginning with staring spells as a child and then
later on generalized convulsions with loss of consciousness, he experiences as
many as 4 seizures a week between the ages of 18 to 30. After that, the
seizures become milder and less frequent. Coincidentally, his wife, father, and
older brother are physicians and his mother a nurse.

Eichenwald describes his encounters with multiple
neurologists, the best of them being Dr. Naarden. Unfortunately, other health
professionals are portrayed as incompetent, careless, lacking empathy, or even
unscrupulous. Multiple mishaps with prescribed anticonvulsant medications are
chronicled – drug side effects, toxic levels of medicines, and a bout of bone
marrow suppression. He suffers broken ribs, cuts and wounds, burns, and is even
blanketed by deep snow due to seizures.

Eichenwald acknowledges the toll that epilepsy exacts on
roommates, friends, and family. He admits to lots of fear and guilt. At one
point, he seriously considers suicide by overdosing. Everyday life is hardly
ever ordinary: “Now I was scared every day, checking where I stood for dangers,
wondering when consciousness would disappear” (p157). A large section of his
account details the discrimination he encounters at Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania in the early 1980’s. The school dismisses him because of his
uncontrolled epilepsy. He successfully fights their decision and returns to
graduate. Obtaining and holding a job is complicated by his illness, but
Eichenwald becomes a journalist who works for the New York Times.

One British hospital. Seven days and nights. Plenty of perspectives from those who work there, train there, and are treated there. Over the course of one week (October 24 thru October 30), the characters in these connected stories spill their secrets and shame, tout their triumphs and tragedies. And the danger of professional and emotional exhaustion looms very large: "Maybe this is how doctors and nurses finally burn out. Past their failures, their hours, all their inhaled sadness" (p40). What ultimately triggers burnout is "the accrued weight of so many tiny things" (p41).

Readers are privy to the thoughts and sometimes nuanced actions of medical personnel - attending physicians, residents, a medical student, and nurses. The musings of a hospital chaplain, cleaning woman, medical secretary, hospital porter, and patients (a hairdresser and a farmer) are also divulged. But the protagonist is the hospital. More than a physical structure, it is a kind of human hive with many strata of workers, occupants, and those (MD's) at the top. The hospital is portrayed as "a place of brokenness," propped up with occasional promises of hope and the might of technology. But decay can be insidious as some physicians no longer appear capable of compassion or empathy.

Andrew Solomon’s 2012 book Far From the Treeis a study of families with children who are different in all sorts of ways from their parents and siblings to degrees that altered and even threatened family functions and relationships. Years after its publication, director Rachel Dretzin collaborated with Solomon to produce this documentary based on his book. At the time of filming, the children were already adults or were well into their teens. The film looks at how the families came to accept these children and how they sought—with varying success—happiness.

The documentary focuses on five family scenarios: homosexuality (Solomon’s own story); Down syndrome; dwarfism; murder; and autism. Anyone in these families or anyone who knew these families would never invoke the familiar idiom “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” when talking about these children. These apples fell far from the tree, and Solomon builds on that twist to the idiom to characterize the relationship between the affected children and their families as “horizontal.” By extension, Solomon characterizes the relationship of children who are not different from their parents and siblings in any appreciable manner as “vertical.” Only one of the original characters from the book appears in the documentary; the other families are newly “cast.” The film captures the lives of these families with all their challenges and successes, and intercuts footage from home videos the families provided. Dretzin also filmed interviews with parents and in some cases their children. The footage and interviews show how families evolved in their acceptance of their children and their situations as best they could. The best was still heartbreak for some, but real happiness was achieved for others.